


Strip us of our crowns

by Estelle (Fielding)



Series: B99 Season 7 Countdown Project [16]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Episode: s05e01 The Big House Pt. 1, Episode: s05e02 The Big House Pt. 2, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-19 11:30:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22276888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fielding/pseuds/Estelle
Summary: “Look, prison is awful. I hate it here. I'm lonely, I'm scared. I just want to be back home.”We know how prison treated Jake, but what about Rosa? Takes place during The Big House (1&2).
Series: B99 Season 7 Countdown Project [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588849
Comments: 9
Kudos: 63





	Strip us of our crowns

**Author's Note:**

> Story No. 16 of my Season 7 Countdown Project. Thank you to ExplodingSnapple for the prompt!

Rosa starts a riot her first day.

They’ve put her in gen-pop even though everyone hates cops, and thank God she hasn’t personally put away anyone here. She’s not the only cop at Edwards, but she’s the newest, and the rest of them are in for stuff like violent assaults and murders and police brutality that make bank robbery look like child’s play. The only way she can stay safe is to earn their respect, and the only way to do that is to lose her shit a little.

So at lunch, Rosa smashes her tray, turkey sandwich and all, into the face of one of the dirty cops, then throat punches her and puts her in a chokehold. Four guards have to drag her off, kicking and screaming.

Five hours after getting to prison, Rosa is in solitary.

+++

Rosa studied meditation for a while in college. She never reached the deep inner silence and spiritual awakening of transcendental meditation, but she found it pretty damn useful for clearing her head anyway.

Her cell in solitary is so small that she can touch both walls at the same time if she stretches her arms. There’s a dented shelf at the far end with a single bar of soap stuck to it, and beneath it a stained sink and beside that a toilet. The bed is a cot, the mattress thinner than her yoga pad. Rosa gives herself about an hour to freak out in there, to tear the mattress and the threadbare blanket off the bedframe and beat them against the dingy walls, to alternate between screaming and cackling, a sound that makes her scared of and for herself.

She exhausts herself, and then she just stands there in the center of the cell, breathing hard, sweat cooling on her face and neck. She swipes her hair up into a messy bun, pulls it into a knot, and then sits in lotus pose in the middle of the floor and takes a deep breath through her nose. The space smells old and stale, of blood and sweat and piss and, horribly, mashed potatoes.

Rosa closes her eyes and breathes.

+++

She spends more time in solitary than not over the first couple of weeks. Usually it’s in 48-hour stints – two days in, one day out. But by the time Holt and Terry visit she’s been out for a few days straight. The other inmates still hate her, they still stare when she walks by, she can feel their dark gazes burning into the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades. But they keep their distance.

Lonely is alive, at least.

Her cellmate is in for aggravated assault. She says she beat up her own pimp, that the guy had it coming, and Rosa believes her but also figures there’s more to the story. She talks in her sleep, in Spanish, calling for a girl named Esme. Rosa curls up on her side, knees pulled up toward her belly, back to the wall.

The stress of this place is like a poison. She can taste it, can feel it in her blood, thinks about it settling into the marrow of her bones and becoming part of her. She thinks about Jake and how when she sees him again, they’ll both be so different. She knows that he’s harder than he looks. Stronger. But he’s being poisoned too, after all. Even if they get out tomorrow, or the day after or next week – already something’s changed. She’s already lost something but she doesn’t know what.

+++

Rosa love-hates that Terry and Holt visit. She can’t help it: She’s so ashamed, sitting on the other side of the greasy glass barrier, in her faded gray uniform and her lace-less shoes and her recycled underwear. But everything about them exudes comfort and safety and she’s so fucking glad they came. Even Hitchcock is a welcome presence. 

They insist on doing her favors. And she gets it and she’s even grateful, but it’s annoying. She hates coddling under any circumstances, hates the pity and hates giving up even an ounce of independence. In here, she already feels so vulnerable, everything in her life out of her own control.

Still, she comes up with a list of chores for them. It keeps her occupied an entire afternoon, which isn’t so bad.

She sits in the reading room with a pad of yellow legal-sized paper and a pencil and bullet points her requests, each more absurd than the previous. She likes the feel of the pencil scratching across the paper, likes watching the letters form in her own familiar print. For the first time she understands, a little, why Amy likes nice pens and pretty stationery – she would kill (not literally – but maybe she’d stab) for a rollerball pen in blue ink, for crisp white paper.

Writing letters to Adrian is hard, at first. She’s never been to Argentina, never even seen pictures of his ranch, has trouble imagining him in this space she doesn’t know. She never even found out for sure what he did with the scorpions.

She starts by telling him that prison sucks and she misses him. It’s blunt and too personal and she hates it, hates herself, so then she tells him how she wants to gnaw on the tendons in his neck and lick his teeth and the roof of his mouth. From there things get deliciously nasty and she writes until her hand is cramping and she has to stop after every half-page to shake it out.

Around halfway through the legal pad she goes horribly, shamefully confessional again and she can’t help it, doesn’t even try to fight it. She tells him she misses him she needs him she can’t do this she can’t she can’t-

+++

“Diaz,” Holt says. He’s with Amy this time. It’s the first time Amy’s visited, and her face is so kind and pretty and familiar that an ache settles in Rosa’s stomach.

“You have a plan.” Rosa can read it all over them. Amy is practically vibrating, and Holt’s eyebrows are slightly raised.

Rosa hates the plan. And she respects the plan. And even though she’d told Amy that imagining herself strangling the life out of Hawkins wouldn’t be good enough, Rosa does it anyway, all that afternoon and that night after making her request for a visit.

Anger, at least, feels a lot better than fear or despair or shame or a thousand other dumb emotions. Anger is familiar. Anger makes her feel a little like her old self. 

She picks a fight with one of the dirty cops after Hawkins leaves. The ex-cop is in for a string of beatings and bribes and threatening witnesses. Rosa bumps her shoulder and the woman tells her to go to hell and Rosa takes her out at the knees and punches her in the kidney and presses her face into the cracked pavement. It feels great, even when the guards lift her up and carry-drag her away.

When she leaves solitary two days later, she doesn’t even stop at her cell to gather her things. She’s going back to her old life. She’s going home. She already has everything she needs.

**Author's Note:**

> *Title is from Focus on the Game (Bash Brothers).
> 
> *This was a tough one to write – not so much in that it was hard to find the words, it just felt very dark (I mean, obviously). I hadn’t really thought much about how Rosa handled prison, and now I think it was probably both easier and harder for her than for Jake. Easier in that I’m guessing there was somewhat less threat of immediate violence/death. Plus, I think Rosa’s just generally got her emotional shit together better than Jake. But harder in that I think she’d feel more anger/shame/frustration? Also, I think Jake was helped a lot by knowing he had Amy waiting for him on the other side. Rosa was with Pimento at the time, but that relationship wouldn’t have provided nearly the same level of comfort and support. Man. Poor Rosa.


End file.
